Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) receive emergency calls from the legacy time division multiplexing (TDM)-based Selective Router (SR) network and NG9-1-1 Emergency Services IP Network (ESInet). These calls terminate to 911 Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) systems or other call handling systems that distribute the calls to dispatchers. Capable CPE systems provide telemetry information for incoming emergency calls, such as various forms of emergency caller location information, call routing actions, Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) events, etc. CPE systems traditionally interface with on-site call taking and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) applications, which operate on servers in the PSAP and connect directly to the CPE system over the local network. The 911 industry is moving towards using Internet Protocol (IP) based communications, such as voice over IP (VoIP). However, with over 6000 PSAPs operating in the United States alone, the changeover to fully IP-based PSAPs is expected to take many years. As the public safety industry at large transitions to IP-based technology that is deployed to private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructure, interim solutions can bridge the gap to legacy premise-based equipment.
Because each CPE system is a stand-alone, custom-built system, there is a large amount of variation in existing CPE systems across the 6000+PSAPs in the United States. For example, many different proprietary data formats are used across different CPE systems to structure emergency call-related data. Cloud-based call taking and CAD solutions are being developed, such as RapidDeploy's CAD platform. Cloud-based call taking and CAD offers several improvements over traditional on-premises call-taking and CAD systems, including the ability to quickly deploy new features and updates to all users, less on-site infrastructure, and increased immunity to malware attacks. However, cloud-based call-taking and dispatch solutions are typically IP-based, making it challenging to connect to legacy, non-IP-based CPE systems.